Barely a month after board of trustees Chairman J. David Grissom described the University of Louisville’s financial future as “ominous,” the committee charged with screening the school’s next athletic director hired the search firm that submitted the highest bid.

Documents obtained through a public records request show that Korn Ferry’s base fee of $150,000 exceeds the second-most expensive proposal by $50,000 and is nearly twice the average bid of the other seven companies that competed for the contract signed on March 1. Additionally, Korn Ferry will be paid an administrative service charge of $6,000 and up to $30,000 in expenses.

Connecticut-based Academic Keys submitted the lowest bid: $35,000.

U of L interim President Greg Postel, who chairs the search committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment placed through a university spokesman. But citing Korn Ferry’s prominence among college search firms, Academic Keys’ Valerie Woodruff said, “I’m not really surprised.”

DHR International's Jeffrey Cohn, a Louisville native whose mother was once a U of L homecoming queen, declined comment on his company's unsuccessful $100,000 bid except to say, "We wish the university the best of luck."

“If you compare our collegiate work to many of our competitors, you will see that we are not a high-volume practice,” Korn Ferry vice chairman Jed Hughes wrote in his letter of application. “Our team takes a white-glove approach to every search assignment. We remove ourselves from the market and only take on one athletic director search at a time. This is a commitment that many of our competitors do not make, but is a philosophy we firmly believe in. Athletic Director searches are fast-paced and complex, which is why they deserve our utmost attention and effort.”

Consistent with Postel’s stated desire to complete the hiring process by the end of March, pace has been assigned as much priority as price. U of L’s request for proposals specified that cost and timeframe were each worth 25 percent of the decision in the bid process, with experience accounting for the remaining 50 percent.

According to Hughes’ letter, Korn Ferry’s average athletic director search spans approximately nine weeks. To meet U of L’s accelerated timetable, Hughes outlined a four-week schedule in which a short list of “priority” candidates would be identified by the end of the third week (about March 22), followed by face-to-face interviews and application of the company’s proprietary “KF4D” assessment tool, which “allows our clients to build a powerful ideal candidate profile which all prospective candidates will be evaluated against.”

Serious candidates can expect to be measured not only against a theoretical “ideal” candidate but the flesh-and-blood incumbent, interim AD Vince Tyra. Though Tyra has said he will gladly step aside “if there’s a top-class AD out there that’s really going to help us,” his temp work to date has been well-received and cost-conscious.

Even before he sliced his own annual salary last month, from $1.2 million to $850,000, Tyra had persuaded University of Louisville Athletic Association board member Bill Stone that appointing a search committee was pointless.

“How are you going to do better?” Stone asked. “... I think Vince is a first-class guy, as good as they come. If he doesn’t get it, it would be a bigger upset than if the Eagles beat the Patriots.”

That was before the Eagles did beat the Patriots in the 2018 Super Bowl, of course, and before Tyra fired Mark Jurich, Kim Maffet and Julianne Waldron in a move he described as a “restructuring.”

“I haven’t worried about the interim or acting tag, whatever it is at this point,” Tyra said on Feb. 8. “You get into these positions and ... you can’t get caught up in whether you’re interim. You have to make decisions on what is best on behalf of the department.”